Leaderboard

I second the idea of just doing it for fun. Doing it for profit almost always requires you to compromise and then the measure of success is not how much you enjoyed doing it or how well it came out, it's how much did it make. I only did crowd-funding so that I could make physical stuff (DVDs, comics, View-Master reels, etc.) Going forward, I probably won't go the physical route anymore. Even Best Buy doesn't sell physical media anymore. AI does offer some interesting options, but it's too unruly and the limitations almost always outweigh the benefits. I've been making children's medical education videos for work using AI and it's amazing that I can accomplish things in such a short time …but it works best for looser, random things. Getting it to do anything specific can make you pull your hair out.

You should just self publish ! Man its a tough world out there, but now you have so many avenues to expose your work from social media, your tube etc. No more burning CD's and DVD's so take advantage. wouldn't worry about ai, real art is hand created, not with prompts, great idea to do a refresh and have fun along the way. From our experience, we have tried so many things in the past years to " commercialise " from games, to hardware and software projects and more and what I learned is that if you plan to make something for commercial gain then be prepared to spend all your money or be prepared to give most of your intellectual property away while going through every possible obstacle under the sun to try and realise this commercial venture, where you have invested all your money into it and the project never gets finished because of these and other factors, also because somewhere along the road you forgot why it is that your are doing this work for, and commercial success / exposure become the point of focus. You stop having fun and burn out, with no finances and fist full of ideas, hopes and dreams, you reluctantly go back to work while you are burned out to catch up and get your grind on. Ive had plenty of opportunities to make good money with the right connections in the industry, but something . . . that little thing called artist integrity always made me stop, don't be a sell out man, to the point where you feel like you are fake just like the people and the commercial industry that surrounds you, then you have a Jerry Maguire moment and walk away from it all, because your cup is overflowing with bullshit and sitting for 6 hours in traffic everyday has sucked the life out of you. After many years once your mind recovers, you have almost caught up financially and thanks to your mentor, you have tuned your focus by going back to basics and doing what you know instead of trying to do what you didn't know, you find once things smooth out, that hey you've got al these cool projects on the shelf, you life is almost balanced, and now you can take some of those shelved projects and spend some time to do little bits of it at a time . . . for FUN, and now software has advanced, hardware is advanced, there is so much more now that you can do that you couldn't do back then and things begin to become fun again! Aha! THAT was the element that was missing, sure you can do hard work, but if you dont have fun along the way its never a good thing. This is what I've realised, if you concentrate on trying to make a commercial product, it will show, if you throw the commercial aspect of your work out the window and concentrate on having fun, it will show in your work and in turn people will see it in your work and they will be drawn to it and you can share it with them, then you may get approached by the commercial people who want to use your intellect to make money, just some of my experience I thought Id share after reading your post. The best thing is that you do it ! Once I was commissioned to draw a comic book and I looked at the end commercial product and the task was daunting . . . then my mentor ( old boss ) said, hey if you draw a page a day, at the end of the year you will have a 365 page graphic novel , true, just do bits at a time and dont look at the commercial aspect of your work on the horizon line and most importantly have fun while you do it ! I pretty much learned AM ( the basics ) in 30 Minutes while I was working in Advertising to produce some TVC's, as the software we were using was quite shit for character animation at the time, in fact at that time you either used SGI stuff Softimage etc, Lightwave or the small number of 3D apps that were only ever useful for doing title animations, AM was a revelation and hyper intuitive its was as if it anticipated how 3D modelling, rigging and animation SHOULD work, it was brilliant and still is to this day in all its flaws and achievements. The I did a brief internship with Momentum Animations and we still produce " commercial " work routinely with AM even though the worlds moved on with other apps, literally commercials. But Dylan Perry has been quietly working over the years on a feature length animation, bit by bit he's the guy you should talk to and get some inspiration, we don't classify as having major commercial success, but he knows the biz if that interest you Reworking is the key, he has so many models and set designs that are being updated and reused in his film I am watching what your are wanting to do in the real and you have a good idea to rehash your work and bring it out again Keep going man !